


through the looking glass

by smthwallflower



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alcoholic Booker | Sebastien le Livre, Blood, Booker | Sebastien le Livre Needs Therapy, Booker | Sebastien le Livre Needs a Hug, Death, Depressed Booker | Sebastien le Livre, Drowning, Everyone Needs A Hug, Exiled Booker | Sebastien le Livre, F/F, F/M, Gen, Good Quynh | Noriko, Gore, M/M, Nightmares, Quynh Needs Therapy, Quynh | Noriko Needs a Hug, booker & quynh friendship fic, booker screwing things up by trying to help - again, booker's a disaster but he tries so hard, but angry quynh, momentary self harm, road trip fic, two flaming dumpster fires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-12
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-19 03:34:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29993244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smthwallflower/pseuds/smthwallflower
Summary: Booker saves Quynh from a quasi-military operation torture chamber, and they travel across the continent running into trouble, both in the form of the guns that are chasing them, and their own deep-seated and suppressed traumas. They do eventually run into Andy and Joe and Nicky and Nile, but how are you supposed to rectify reality with hope, when those two things seem so unattainable? A fic of found family, purpose, fate and love.Big bang fic with art by bloodsuitsandtears.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Quynh | Noriko, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 6
Kudos: 63
Collections: The Old Guard Big Bang





	through the looking glass

**Author's Note:**

> Wonderful art by bloodsuitsandtears, who you can find on tumblr and through the link below! So grateful to have these art pieces accompanying the story. Part of the Old Guard big bang!

art by [bloodsuitsandtears](https://blood-suits-and-tears.tumblr.com/)

-

Booker’s picking his way through the sand with a bottle of off-brand rum in his hand; it was fucking hot in Chile, and he’d slept on the beach yesterday after realizing he’d wandered too far to be able to make it back to his room before nightfall. His empty stomach is gnawing at him in angry protest, and the tepid liquid from the bottle isn’t doing anything to settle it. 

So he’s not really sure if he’s hallucinating or not when he reaches a natural wavebreak and sees two dozen people in full combat gear on the other side of the sparse tree growth, dragging a body out of the ocean. It looks sketchy, especially given the boat that’s speeding away in the horizon. 

Instinctively, Booker crouches, not keen on being riddled with bullet holes from a group of people that looked to be on the opposite spectrum of friendly than the locals he’d been renting a room from. 

The body they’re dragging is small, and he sees that it’s a woman when they flip her around onto the sand. Then they shoot her and he cringes, closes his eyes, slipping down against the sandy outwash. Even if he hadn’t been drunk, he comforts himself, he wouldn’t have been able to save her. 

Then a wet, choking cough comes over the wavebreak, and Booker freezes. 

It’s that moment that he puts it together, the awareness in his bones coming from something entirely unnatural. 

“Quynh,” he mutters to himself, and he lets go of the bottle, dropping to his stomach and peeking back over the small hump of the ridge with a sniper’s eye. 

The black tangled hair is matted all to hell and he can’t see her face from here - but the ocean, the last dream that had suffocated him: there had been something different about it, some sort of quality that was impossible to explain. It must have been this, Quynh no longer at the bottom of the ocean, finding her way to the top of the ocean. And now she was out. 

But who the fuck were these people who had her? 

They’re dragging her through the sand and she tries pitifully to fight against them; the squirming she produces isn’t even inconveniencing them, but they still shoot her, and Booker’s fingers clench as she goes limp. 

He has to get her. But how? All he has right now are khaki shorts, flip flops held together with rope, a mostly empty bottle of warm rum and a floral patterned shirt missing three buttons. Not exactly the paradigm of rescue. 

As much as he hates it, getting her right now is out of the picture. These people know she won’t die, and they clearly want her. Adding another body that won’t stay dead to their pile isn’t going to be helpful. 

There’s a truck waiting for them, and Booker pushes himself up into a crouch, ducking between the trees and keeping a careful eye for anyone who might be too observant. They dump Quynh in the back of the truck and the various bodies pile in amongst the other vehicles. 

They’re going to get away from him, that much is obvious. He has no way of keeping up with the convoy. 

The trucks start, rev, then disappear down tracks that can’t even generously be called a dirt road. 

Three giant trucks like that though - it shouldn’t be hard to track through a forest as dense as this. They’d leave a mark, and he’ll be able to follow that trail. 

It is Quynh though. Over five centuries in the water and all she gets at the end of it is undisclosed military-like personal shooting at her for sport. That, and Booker to rescue her, banished from the others with barely the clothes on his back.

He needs a plan. 

He needs to figure out where they’re keeping her. He needs to get her back. Then he needs to get her to the others. 

-

It’s not the greatest of plans, but it’s the best he can manage on such short notice. His hosts have a friend who gets Booker a job at the militaristic compound in exchange for a couple hundred of the local currency, no questions asked. It’s proven difficult for the compound to find someone willing to scrap blood and guts and who knows what else off the floor, but Booker needs an in so he’ll take it. 

Booker’s not sure exactly what kind of experiments are going on here, but he’s fairly certain that most of the time, the parts he shovels into the bins of biohazardous waste had once belonged to animals. At least, he hopes so. 

It takes a week and a half to get himself into the compound. Another two days to figure out where they’re keeping Quynh, and by that point, the level carnage coming out of her section makes it easy for him to opt into being the clean up crew for it. 

The first job is mopping up a bloodbath, but there are no bodies. Was it Quynh’s blood then? How many times did they kill her to create this much blood? 

Booker goes about his business, doesn’t ask questions. It’s grim work, but his own connection with blood and gore makes him uniquely qualified to do the job. That doesn’t keep him from drinking himself to sleep most nights though. And among those nights, there’s only one more dream that Quynh and him share, before they see each other for the first time. 

Quynh’s anguish from drowning has shifted to fury and blinding pain, an animalistic madness that has Booker rolling clear out of his cot. 

It’s hard to breathe, in a different way than the drowning had been; it squeezes his lungs just the same, nerve endings screaming with enough pain that he wants to rip himself out of his skin. 

When he wakes up the sensations take a while to settle, and he stays on the floor until the shaking stops. Hold on Quynh, he thinks, I’m almost there. Part of him wonders though, how much of her will be left when he does get there. 

He sees Quynh the next day; it’s just a glimpse of her, really. He’s waiting in the hallway for guards to clear the room so he can pick up the pieces left behind, and the door opens and they have her between two men, her hands and feet tied together, her body literally dripping with blood. They carry her, a stringy ball of a person, one guard to each arm. 

Her eyes are half open. It seems like they’ve drugged her, given the way her eye line keeps drifting off into the distance. 

She doesn’t notice him, but he sees her, feels a connection between them that aches harder the further away she gets. 

There is a body in the room this time, sliced and diced like an onion that Nicky’s gone mad over.

Booker finds the knife that did the damage, a small dagger, embedded in an arm, and he drinks himself to sleep that night to try to get rid of the image, trying to mask the smell of blood in his nose with the smell of whiskey. At least there are no more nightmares of drowning, but it’s a cold comfort when he knows that Quynh is instead spending her days locked up, tortured, drugged, and alone. 

-

A week later, he finally puts the framework of his plan into action. Mostly it consists of a car waiting for them on a seldom used road near the back of the compound, and insider knowledge that today there will be only one guard keeping an eye on Quynh’s cell, due to another untimely death. 

That day Booker brings into work a duffel bag and a short sword, breaks into the weapons locker and fills his bag with an assortment of guns. The bag of weapons goes into a biohazard waste bin, and he wheels it down the halls as the guards ignore him. 

When he gets to Quynh’s holding cell, the guard at the door glances over at him curiously, and Booker has enough of a heart to feel sorry at the look of genuine surprise that crosses the guards face as he falls to the ground, a bullet through his heart. The clock is running, and Booker quickly disengages the lock on the door. 

The bolts of the door retract with heavy thumps, and Booker opens the door carefully, peeking inside first to make sure Quynh isn’t waiting, ready to take his head off. 

She’s not poised for attack though, she’s just sitting in the corner with the fabric bands around her wrist strapped tightly together, the ones around her ankles just as tight. She’s watching him carefully, alertly, unnervingly still, tension on the foot long length separating her wrists from her ankles. 

Booker slips into the room, leaving the door ajar. The last thing they need is for him to get stuck in here too. 

He holds his hands up, unarmed, defenseless; his shirt is tight, nothing to hide there, his pants full of pockets, but he can’t turn each one of them out right now. “Quynh,” he says softly and her eyes widen and snap to his before the frown comes over her face, the suspicion. 

She has no reason to trust him, unless she remembers his face from the nightmares - and even that’s a piss poor reason to trust him. 

“Do you understand me?” he asks slowly; to his knowledge, no one has been able to communicate with her yet. But she was stolen in England, it was probably one of the last languages that she knew. 

Her face betrays nothing, and when he takes another step closer, she jerks at the restraints, her lip twitching in a feral instinct. 

“I’m a friend,” Booker tells her gently, and he gets to his knees - cutting her free isn’t going to work if she doesn’t trust him, he’d cleaned up the last guy who’d gotten too close to her with a knife and they don’t have time for that right now. 

When he pulls out the blade from his pocket and clicks it open, she’s on her feet in an instant, an angry hiss and a mouth full of teeth warning him from getting closer. “I’m family, Quynh,” he says evenly, calmly, and he holds out the blade. 

“I’m here to take you home. If you’ll let me. Remember home?” 

The teeth disappear and she stares at him. 

“Casa.” 

The aggression eases, and she looks almost confused now.

“Alsafhat alrayiysia.” 

Now she’s definitely confused, 

“Trang Chủ. Oikos. I’ll take you there. To them.”

Putting his faith in the power of love, his immortality and a handful of words, Booker tosses the knife to Quynh, then sits back on his heels. “But we need to go quickly.” 

The knife skitters to a halt at Quynh’s feet, and she looks outright incredulous now. But she glances at the door, then sits down and twists the knife up in the length between wrists and ankles, using torque to make up for awkwardness and weakness, wrenching at it until the length snaps. 

She digs the knife between her skin and an ankle bracelet; the blood drips from the cuff as she twists it, not even a twitch of pain crossing her face. The ankle cuff finally snaps off and she stands. The knife dances through her fingers as she angles it against one of her wrist cuffs - and then it’s flying at Booker and he ducks; someone screams from behind him and Booker scrambles to his feet as Quynh darts past him, through the open door. 

The man dies with Quynh on his chest as she swiftly cuts his throat, her hands still bound together. Shit, Booker thinks, they’re out of time. “We have to go,” he tells her again, picking the duffel bag out of the biohazard bin, and pointing in the right direction - an alarm starts to blare and he curses to himself; they’re so close. 

Booker pulls out a gun from the bag, then slings the bag over his shoulder. Quynh stares at the gun, watches him cock the hammer with interest. They don’t have time for a gun-toting tutorial right now, and he uses it to wave her towards him, “Come on.” 

He moves down the hallway, feels Quynh following behind him. At the door she darts past him to open it, but he puts a hand on her forearm; the knife is against his throat as she crowds him against the wall. He lets go of her arm and she abruptly drops away as well. There’s a nick, right under his chin, but he can forgive her for that easily. “I open the doors,” he tells her. “Do you know how to flank?” 

Quynh narrows her eyes at him, switches the grip she has on the knife so fluidly Booker can’t track how she does it. 

Whether it’s a yes or a no doesn’t really matter. “We’ll just do our best then,” he mutters to himself. 

Booker opens the door and Quynh darts through it, quick as a snake; Booker shoots two people and Quynh throws her knife at a third as she leaps onto a fourth’s shoulders, throwing her hands over their neck and pulling hard. The person falls back, on top of her, but she tightens her hold, with a quick twist, she snaps their neck. 

She’s on her feet a moment later, and she seems to stumble just once before she straightens and scans the room. 

It’s like watching Andy fight. God, he misses Andy. 

Then she’s somersaulting away from him and Booker notices the next two guards just in time to duck away from a shower of bullets. One nicks him in the arm, and he finds himself behind a cargo box, Quynh sliding in next to him. 

Quynh holds her wrists up to him, but he shakes his head, “I don’t have a key. We could try the knife but-” it was currently embedded in someone’s heart. Quynh looks at the gun in his hand, and Booker shakes his head, “The bands are strong. We can’t shoot them off.” 

There’s a short-sword, in his bag though, and he pulls it out. “Try-” 

He doesn’t finish, the sword in Quynh’s hands as she vaults over the top of the cargo box. 

“Fuck,” he mutters, used to working with a little more coordination. He braces his arms on the cargo box as he pops his head over it, gun trained on... 

Booker shoots a guard, then shoots him again as Quynh races along the top of a stack of cargo boxes, the sword in her hands as the other guard below tries to follow her. The lighting fixtures are impeding the guards ability to see clearly straight up, and Quynh is obviously using it to her advantage. 

With a leap, Quynh is on top of him, rolling to break her fall before slicing the inside of his leg and then spinning to slash open the span of his bulletproof vest, and his chest as well. It’s not necessarily a fatal wound by itself, not deep enough if help could get to him in time, but the artery in his leg is spitting out blood like a well-used water pump, and he crumples to the ground. 

Booker comes up behind her, shoots the guard through the heart. 

Quynh half turns to him, the sword lowered in her tied hands, looking at him with a question. 

“We don’t know that he deserved to suffer,” Booker tells her, and he doesn’t think unwarranted suffering is something she’d want to do on purpose, but the funny look she gives him makes him second guess it. He throws the gun down, the magazine empty, pulls another one out of his bag. 

This was a lot easier when Nicky carried all the extra guns around. 

“Let’s go,” he says, and she stops him with the flat of the bloody blade against his chest. When he frowns she lifts her wrists at him; he doesn’t want to hurt her, but it would be less dangerous if he wasn’t the only one with two free hands - though it didn’t seem to slow her down at all… 

With a disgruntled sigh he takes the sword from her, wedges it between the two bands and twists. The pain as the bands compress Quynh’s wrists is obvious from the grimace on her face, but it doesn’t take long for the connection between them to snap from the pressure and the sharp edge of the sword. 

Quynh flexes her fingers, stretches her arms once, then knocks the sword out of his hand with a bump to the bottom of the handle that startles it out of his grip, finishing with a neat catch over his hand. 

He sees the flash of a grin on her face as she heads to the next door, and he wishes someone else was here to both admire her showmanship, and appreciate how extraordinary this whole situation was. This lithe after being locked up for a month, following centuries under the ocean… what would she be like when she wasn’t recovering from the throes of death? 

This time she waits by the door for him, charging in after he opens it. 

There’s a few more people in this room, and Booker soon feels a bullet tearing through his lungs as he falls backwards; he shoots the one that shot him, but there’s another one who gets him in the shoulder, and then the arm, and the force of the bullets knock the gun right out of his hand. 

Quynh, who’s probably forty feet away, flicks her sword to the other hand, picks up a gun from the ground, aims, and shoots the guard advancing on Booker right through the back of his head. 

The guard falls at Booker’s feet, and he stares at Quynh behind the sight of the gun realizing: Nicky got his stance from her. It’s been refined a little bit, and shifts slightly forward or back depending on how heavy the weapon in Nicky’s hand is, but the set of the shoulders and the set of her legs have Nicky written all over them. 

Or Nicky’s had Quynh, written all over him this whole time. 

Booker closes his eyes as he feels his insides ripping apart, and not just from the blood soaking through his shirt. 

Quynh doesn’t come to see how he’s doing, and once he can move again, he gets up to see where she went. The bag of guns is across her back and she has the short sword in one hand and the gun in the other, unleashing a whirlwind of destruction as she clears out the next room. 

He’s not sure if the blood on Quynh is hers or someone else's, doesn’t much care about it since she seems fine and there’s extra clothes in the car. What he does know is she’s just as deadly as Andy is on any given day, and right now she’s half-starved and probably hasn’t moved this much since well before the bastards threw her into the ocean. 

Quynh’s making her way back to him when she sees him. She pushes her fingers against the hole that the bullet had left in his shirt, and, satisfied that he’s in fight form presumably, passes him a gun she’d picked up when the last guard fell. She looks at the two hallways they’re faced with, and then expectantly at him. 

Booker takes them down the left hall, Quynh sniping people with a handgun almost before he notices them; some shots are better than others, but Booker isn’t going to complain. 

The last obstacle is a large steel door that Quynh stares at incomprehensibly as he connects his bypass controller to the electric lock. Before he can start the program, Quynh takes a shot at the door. Booker covers his head too late to protect himself from anything with a startled, “Hey!” 

Quynh looks at him unperturbed, and he shows her the controller. “It’s locked electrically. We can’t shoot it to get through. I’m using this like a key.” He looks at the scuff in the metal door from her gun, frowns. “Those things ricochet like mad, be careful with it.” 

The next bullet hits someone running past them, and then the door is opening, sunlight and fresh air and a gust of wind assaulting them. He leaves the controller behind to self-destruct after twenty second. 

Booker takes Quynh’s arm as she stumbles on her first step into the outside world; the sword comes up half-heartedly to push him away but he moves it aside with his hand. “We’re almost done. Come, please.” 

She can barely see, and even his eyes are having trouble adjusting. The rough ground must be irritating her feet, and the wind is whipping his hair into his eyes; Quynh’s hair is having a wrestling match with her entire face. 

Tolerating his grip now, she lets him pull her down the dirt path. The door they’d exited from explodes when they get to the fence, and Booker spares a glance behind them to make sure no one has followed. The sand is empty, the wind having erased even their most recent footprints. Booker cuts the fence and he lets Quynh through first before following, and then tugs the bag through behind him. The car is just at the bottom of the hill, and Quynh seems to have regained some control over herself. 

She scans the horizon and Booker wonders what she’s thinking - Andy was always on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary, but with Quynh it’s more like she’s actively searching for something. 

“Just down the hill,” Booker tells her, and he sets off, can see her shadow behind him soon after, following him. 

The hill is a little bit longer than he remembered, and Quynh seems to be stumbling more often now. Maybe it’s the adrenaline wearing off, or maybe she’s finally depleting the last that she had left to give.

They get to the car and Booker opens the door to the backseat. Quynh crawls in willingly and lies down on the wide seat, struggling to keep her eyes open. 

“I’m Sébastien. Le Livre. Our family calls me Booker.” 

Quynh’s eyes close and he shuts the door, then gets into the front seat. As he drives away, he readjusts the rearview mirror so it catches Quynh in it. 

So far, so good.

-

The door to the cell is already open, but the room is empty and they’re too late. 

There’s fury on Nicky’s face while Andy stands with her hands against the wall, her eyes closed. Joe is examining the cell, but it’s Nile who finds the signs outside the room. 

“She’s not alone,” Nile tells them, “Look, there was someone with her.” 

The blood is fresh, and when Joe puts a finger in it, they realize it hasn’t had time to properly congeal. “Not an hour ago,” Joe informs them, and he wipes the blood off on the dead man’s shirt. 

“We’ll find her,” Nicky promises, and Andy nods. It’s her fault - she shouldn’t have gotten her hopes up. She should’ve gotten here faster. 

-

Quynh’s still out when they get to the safehouse. There’s enough supplies here to tide them through the night, but they’ll have to leave tomorrow morning. Booker has some more safe houses set up along the way to the south of the continent, the next fragments of his vague plan after ‘save Quynh’. 

He knows what he would do with anyone else laid out in the backseat like that - gather them up in his arms and get them to bed, or to the bathtub if they needed to be scrubbed down first. Quynh is tall, but she’s light, so Booker can manage the doors just fine in between the car lean-to and the house with her in his arms. He hesitates in the front hall space, torn between the bed and the bath. 

There’s no doubt in his mind that Quynh will react badly to being put in a tub and bathed. But he can’t in good conscience put her to bed when she’s such a mess. After so long stuck in that inhumane prison, he wanted to make sure her first memories outside of it are of comfort and ease. 

Booker sets her on the couch as a compromise, then goes to the kitchen to fill a bowl with some water. He takes a cloth and when he gets back to her, starts gently wiping down her face, working the blood off her arms as well. There’s enough grime and blood to turn the water dark after just a few passes, and when he comes back after changing out the water, she’s awake and looking at him, just as boneless as she’d been in the car. 

“I moved you from the car,” he tells her, pointing to the doorway they’d come in from in a vague attempt to be transparent. “We’re going to stay here tonight. I wanted to clean you up a bit before getting you to bed.” 

Quynh’s eyes close again, and he wonders how weak she is, what they’d been feeding her in the compound. “I’ll bring you some water and food,” he tells her, and he leaves the bowl and comes back with some bread and water. The water in the bowl is gone, but there’s some colour in her cheeks. 

“Here,” he says, putting the bread next to her and sitting on the coffee table in front of the couch. He holds the water for her, watches the heaviness in her body as she bites into some bread. It takes some effort for her to chew. He’s not sure how the super killer from the base has turned into this lethargic human who can barely move, but he’s glad to be here for it. There might be some sort of drug in her system wearing off, or kicking in, who knows what the fuckers had been doing to her.

He helps her sit up when she’s ready, and then she takes the water from him. 

With a sigh, he gets more water for the bowl, comes back with a clean cloth and some soft clothes that should more-or-less fit. “You can change into these,” he tells her, “Unless you want to take a shower first. A bath,” he amends, remembering showers probably weren’t around back then, and her borderline reproachful look is answer enough. “Alright. Suit yourself. There’s a tie for your hair if you want it. I’ll be back in a bit to help you to bed. Or, just… shout.” 

He’s not abandoning her, he tells himself, he’s just giving her some privacy. When he comes back, she’s changed and washed the worst of the blood and grim off her face. She must be tired, because she’s lying on the couch again, dozing. 

“I’m going to pick you up,” he tells her softly, “Put you in the bed.” 

She doesn’t answer him, but her arm comes around his neck when he lifts her, and they tighten briefly when he puts her down on the bed. He sits on the edge of it as her head hits the pillow and her eyes close completely. A minute later her head turns as the muscles in her neck relax, and she goes so still Booker puts a hand under her nose to make sure she’s breathing. 

They’ll be safe here for now. With a sigh he puts his head in his hands, rubs at his face, hard. 

Phase one of the plan is done: get Quynh out of that hellhole. 

Phase two is in progress: stay away from the people who want her back. 

Now they just need to find the others. 

Booker checks his phone, but there’s still no messages on it. He dials Andy, and nothing, no voicemail. Dials Nile, nothing, no voicemail. Joe and Nicky don’t answer either, their phones disconnected entirely and he frowns at the dark wall. 

He’d expected them to be cold, but to ignore him completely? It doesn’t seem possible. Not with Andy and Nile; and he knows Joe and Nicky, knows they’d be worried about why he’s reaching out when he knows he shouldn’t be. 

There was something wrong, but he needed to help Quynh and him first, before he could figure out what was going on with them. 

If they’d be taken again - 

At least he has Quynh. Together, they’d be able to bust the others out of anything. 

Booker takes a shower, opens a bottle of scotch, stops drinking when he feels his mind floating pleasantly. It would be dangerous to pass out right now, especially with how vulnerable they are. But a little bit won’t hurt, will help ease any dreams he might have. 

It’s a blank night in his mind, and when he wakes up, he checks on Quynh. Quynh, who’s still out like a light, who has wrapped herself so completely up in the blankets that he can only see the top of her head. 

He leaves the door open for her and starts putting together a simple warm breakfast. The preparations don’t take long, and neither does Quynh. 

“Booker,” Quynh says, and Booker’s surprised to hear her voice. It feels like he’s known her for so long that hearing her voice for the first time shouldn’t be this alien. Then he thinks belatedly that he probably should have put on a shirt after he woke up; she’s got sweatpants and a sweater despite the warmth in the kitchen, but she looks comfortable. 

Even though there’s no question, he still answers, “Yeah?” as he turns back to the stove. He’s making eggs and toast, nothing fancy or groundbreaking. Tomatoes on the side, slices of apple with cheese and a banana. Nice, simple, easy to get down. Lots of options, in case something doesn’t sit well.

Quynh is suddenly behind him, and he hadn’t heard her move at all. Her chin hovers by his shoulder, not quite touching him, as she examines the pan. 

“Preference?” he asks, and she gives him some side-eye look before exploring the kitchen. Her hand lingers inside the fridge feeling the chill of it, and she counts the plates that are stuffed into the cabinets. She sits down at the table when Booker finishes cooking, staring at her plate while he takes the first bite of his meal. 

“Best when it’s warm,” he tells her, trying not to make a big deal of it, and she picks up her fork, tries a little bit of egg. She doesn’t complain and chews slowly, carefully, first finishing her eggs, then the toast, then the apple, then the cheese, then the banana and the tomato. 

Booker hadn’t put it all on her plate with the expectation that she’d eat it all. He’s not quite sure where it’s all gone, and he finishes his own meal in silence. 

They need to get going soon, but Booker doesn’t want to pull her out of here too quickly. 

“Did you sleep well?” Booker asks when both their plates are empty, and Quynh sits back on her chair, fixing her gaze at him. Looks him over, up and down: bare chested, needing a shave, jeans slung low over his hips. The look is so analyzing he feels like she’s picking him apart with her eyes; well, look on, he thinks, leaning back himself. I’m a fucking disaster, but I’m the only thing you’ve got until we find the rest of them. 

“It was cold,” she says softly, slowly, her words accented with some long lost lilt to her English that he recognizes Nicky had, once upon a time. Back when Nicky was belabouring being educated in proper colloquial French, griping good-naturedly about learning such a brutish language. 

Booker nods; it was more likely due to her constitution instead of any external factor, but he still says, “We’ll get you something warmer to wear.” 

There’s no acknowledgement from Quynh, but he knows she understands - knows that she speaks English herself. There are a multitude of questions he wants to ask her, most of which he feels are likely inappropriate, amongst which: ‘are you mad?’ rises to the top. 

Instead, he stands, gathers their plates, loads them in the dishwasher and sets it so they’ll be ready for the next inhabitant of this place.

Quynh is gone when he’s finished, and he finds her in the bedroom, picking through his belongings. 

He walks in while she’s sniffing at his flask; she hears him, turns to give him a look that resembles disappointment. He folds his arms to it; everyone had their own way of getting through the hard times, and he wasn’t about to accept judgement about his methods. A lot of things had changed in five hundred years. 

“Passports,” he says when she holds the pair of them up to examine. “You need them to cross borders between countries sometimes. We need to get a photograph of you; it’s a likeness, but digital. Ah,” he realizes she may not know what something digital is - these things hadn’t been around when he was born, much less hundreds of years before then. “A device records an image. You can print it, and that’s a photograph.” 

Quynh ignores his rambling, checks the sharpness of his knives. Tries to cock a gun, and he’s about to point out the safety when she finds the lever, disengages it, and succeeds in cocking it. “Semi-automatic handgun,” he provides, “Most people don’t carry them around unless they want trouble, so try to be discrete with it. I’ll show you how to use them later.” 

There’s also a notebook, one he took from Joe, who had declared the paper too coarse and unfeeling after only a handful of sketches and musings. Booker had meant to rip those pages out, but Quynh runs her finger along the crest of Andy’s cheek now, before Andy had cut her hair. There’s an indecipherable look on Quynh’s face. “Andy,” Booker provides, and at this Quynh’s eyes flicker upwards, but stop before they look at him.

“An,” she tells him wistfully, and she caresses the picture of Nicky on the next page as well, then traces her finger under a sentence. The rest of the pages are Booker’s own scrawlings, coordinates and numbers and shopping lists and whatever was running through his mind at the moment. Quynh shuts the book, sets it gently aside. 

There’s an extra set of clothes for him, an extra set for her. Quynh takes the long-sleeve he’d packed for himself, puts it on over her sweater. The cuffs pool by her wrists, making her hands seem even smaller. Small but deadly, he thinks, and she clicks open the knife she finds, flips it between her fingers. 

He hasn’t seen anyone handle a knife the way she does. 

Quynh catches it and pauses. Moves the tip of the blade into the palm of her hand, pressing it harder and harder until a line of blood begins to trickle down her palm. 

“Hey,” Booker protests, and he steps forward to take the knife away from her, but he must startle her because she twists off the bed and points the knife at him in defense. Booker pulls his hands back, raises them to the side. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he reminds her evenly, “And you shouldn’t either.” 

Quynh glares at him until the expression abruptly drops away, then tosses the knife onto the bed carelessly. She turns to go to the bathroom, shuts the door behind her. Booker sighs as he starts putting the things back into his bag. 

He frowns at the blood still on the knife's blade before wiping it into the covers - they already had blood on them, what was a little more? It’s still troubling, but it seemed like Quynh’s action had come from curiosity. Who was he to really say? 

The toilet flushes and after a while the facet turns on. There’s a hiss which he takes to mean that Quynh has discovered how hot the water can get, and after the facet turns off, there’s silence. 

After a few minutes, Booker knocks on the door, but there’s no answer. “Quynh?” he asks; there hadn’t been any noises to indicate she’d fallen or needed help. Still, after watching her with the knife, the silence is more unsettling that it might have otherwise been. “Quynh, I’m opening the door,” he says, and he opens it slowly. 

Quynh isn’t doing anything other than staring into the mirror, but the expression on her face is unreadable. 

Mirrors wouldn’t have been commonplace, when she was around; and she looks ragged even by his own lax standards, her hair still a mess of tangles, the worst of the grim still stuck to her skin, her face hollow and her body gaunt.

“We have to go,” he says as gently as he can, and she blinks, but doesn’t look away, so he steps forward and puts a hand on her arm, “Quynh-”

Quynh catches his wrist quick as a viper and he steps back, but she’s already twisting it and the resulting tussle has him on the ground in the doorway, lying on his back, Quynh sitting on top of him holding both his arms tightly against his chest, her lips twisted into a faint snarl.

“We have to go,” he tells her again, calmly, and she narrows her eyes at him, her lips a thin line. Then she huffs and gets off, apparently accepting his explanation, and he sits up, rubbing the back of his head where it’d hit the ground. She was light but strong, used to compensating for a difference in weight. 

Booker takes the bag, grabs the remaining bananas from the counter, and leads Quynh into the car. 

“Truck,” she says when he’s pulling out, and Booker glances at her as he’s reversing. 

“More like a car. Same idea, just smaller. Put on your seatbelt.” 

Quyhn ignores him - though more likely, she doesn’t know what a seatbelt is - and looks out the window instead, watching the house until it disappears. 

For a while she looks out the window, until she yawns into the back of her hand with a tiny, cat-like gesture. She’s never looked more human to Booker, and he can’t articulate the protest in time as she crawls over the console to the backseat. 

His sweater bunches around her as she lies down on the backseat, and his protests fade away. Their body’s were supposed to bounce back quickly enough, but how long did it take for someone’s psychology to bounce back from something like what Quynh had experienced? 

She takes a handgun out of the bag in the footwell, cocks it, tucks it under her stomach, and uses her arm as a pillow to fall asleep on. 

-

Quynh wakes up while Booker’s on the highway, and she’s so out of place she falls right off the backseat and into the footwell. Booker slows down and pulls over while Quynh is arranging herself into a more dignified sitting position. They’re almost at the store, and he was hoping she might have slept through him getting them some food and necessities before they got to the next safehouse. 

Once the car’s in park, Booker turns around to talk to her only to find a gun in his face. 

He sighs, but he doesn’t bother moving it. “I’m immortal like you, remember? But please don’t shoot me - the car will smell like brain guts, and gets pretty awful after a while.” 

Quynh lowers the gun, glances around. Seems to remember who he is - where she is. 

“Do you want some water?” Booker asks, taking a bottle from the cup holders and offering her a bottle. Quynh frowns at it, so he opens it for her, passing her both the bottle and the cap. “Screw it on when you’re done.” Which is obvious. They would have had flasks when she was around, a bottle of water would hardly be a big leap. It was going to be hard to keep track of what would need explaining. 

Quynh doesn’t look impressed with him, but she drains the bottle faster than he’s seen Andy chug a beer. Then she lets it fall from her hand onto the seat next to her without capping it. 

Booker doesn’t have the energy to unpack that gesture. 

“I’m going to stop by the shop,” he says instead, adding, “That’s a place where we buy things. Like a market.” 

“Yes,” Quynh says in a tone that affirms they had stores in the 1500s, and he was being an idiot. With a fluid movement she stands, pitching herself between the two front seats and rolling against the seat until she’s sitting down in a heap. 

He’s not sure how she makes such a ridiculous movement look so fluid, but there’s not a gun in his face, and she’s not fleeing the car, so he’ll take his wins where he can get them. 

Quynh looks out the window as Booker merges back onto the road. They’re almost at the store, and once he finds the turn off the yneed and pulls into a dusty parking lot, he parks as far away from the other cars as he can. They don’t need any more blood on their hands, and he wants to give her a bit more time to adjust, before he starts introducing her to people. 

Booker pockets the keys and says before leaving: “I’ll be ten, fifteen minutes. Please don’t leave the car. Okay?” The last thing they need is undue attention and an incident on their hands. 

Quynh’s eyes roll towards him in an Andy-like gesture. Indulgent, fond, with just a hint of ‘you’re an idiot’. “Great,” he tells her dryly. Not for the first time, he thinks of how much he misses Andy. And how much he wishes she was here. 

When he returns, a bag in each hand, Quynh has made it out of the car, and is standing next to her open door in bare feet. A glance around the parking lot doesn’t suggest that she got out of the car for any particular reason, and he fishes a pair of light-weight shoes out of a bag for her. 

Quynh puts them on without fuss, and he can see her wiggling her toes in them. He’s got a good eye for sizes, and he’s glad they look like they fit. 

“Are you hungry?” he asks as he puts the bags in the back seat. When Quynh nods he gives her a cuñapé and an apple from one of the bags, then pulls out a thick Baja jacket. “I got this too, in case you get cold again.” 

Quynh takes the sweater from him with a grateful smile, and when they get back into the car, she lays it out across her lap like a blanket. “This apple is very fresh,” she tells him after she examines it, pleased. The crunch the apple makes as she bites into it backs up her claim. 

“There’s more in the back,” he tells her, and once she’s finished her apple, she places the core of it into the cup holder, then breaks off a piece of cuñapé and extends it to him. 

It’s a nice gesture, so Booker takes it even though his throat is dry and he can’t reach the bottles in the back while he’s driving. The cuñapé predictably gets stuck in his throat, and he spends a minute coughing until Quynh fishes a bottle of water out the back and passes it to him, unscrewing the cap for him just as he’d done for her.

“Thanks,” he mutters hoarsely, and they drive in silence until Quynh becomes interested in all the buttons that are in her armrest. “What are these?” she asks, poking at one even as she does - the doors in the car unlock all at once, and she looks into the back seat to see what made the noise. 

“The doors have locks,” Booker explains, and he unlocks them on his side. “Windows,” he says, and he rolls down her window with the control on his side. She recoils, slightly, then gamely starts experimenting with the control on her side. The window goes up, the window goes down; door lock and then unlock. 

“Ah,” she says knowingly, and then she’s perusing the rest of the car, opening the glove box compartment, poking through the map and some plastic wrap utensils. She moves the controls on the vents, and Booker shows her the knob that controls the intensity of the air flow, and the one that controls the temperature. Booker lets her explore the car without much comment, though when she opens the door while they’re flying down the highway, he does speak up, but only to say, “Please close that,” in a relatively controlled manner. 

Her experiment with the handbrake makes the car spin out for a moment, and Quynh catches herself with a hand on dash, her fingers wrapped around the handle of the passenger door. It’s the first time he hears her laugh, and he smiles at it. Just as crazy as the rest of them, then. The road is mostly empty, so they manage to avoid hitting anyone else until Booker can wrangle the car back under control. 

When Quynh flips down the overhead mirror, she stares into it for so long that Booker reaches out and shows her the radio. He’s not sure what she’s looking for in her reflection, but the intensity makes him uneasy. 

The radio, thankfully, is of notable interest to her, and she plays with the knobs with the tenacity and curiosity of an inquisitive child who knows they’ll get something right if they can just mimic the exact movements they’ve seen only once before. 

-

Booker pulls into a dark garage not long after, cutting her radio time short. Quynh watches the garage door close in front of them (Booker tends to pull in backwards, for a quick getaway), then glances at the door that leads into the house. “We’ll be safe here tonight,” Booker reassures her, hoping he’s read her concern correctly. 

He takes the grocery bags and their duffel from the back of the car and opens the door to the house, leaving Quynh to explore while he packs the few things away. He watches her slip on the Baja sweater just before he goes through the door - she must still be cold, and given the heat that was still lingering from the peak of day, that wasn’t necessarily a good sign. 

But she’s still recovering. A hot meal would probably help. He drops the duffel in the hallway of the two-bedroom home, takes the few groceries he’d bought into the kitchen. It’s a decent enough kitchen, and there’s already a clean, deep pan on the stovetop. 

Quynh comes into the kitchen after a minute; he keeps most of their groceries in the bags, unpacking just what he needs for the meal tonight. Quynh’s hand runs along the walls, fingers bumping over all the imperfections. When she finds the light switch, she flicks it off and on, just once. 

“How do you find these spaces?” 

Booker is finishing putting the six-pack of beer into the fridge, and shrugs in answer, a hand still on the fridge door. Quynh keeps on looking at him curiously so he elaborates, 

“The Internet, mostly. Favors, sometimes.” 

“Internet?” Quynh asks, and Booker pulls a beer away from its plastic, cracks it open. 

“I’ll show you.” 

He gets his laptop from the duffel; the thing’s rugged and military grade, but it’s showing a little bit of wear and tear from living its life amongst guns and the other random shit they have in there. 

At the table, he sits and opens it, a few mouthfuls of beer filling the time it takes for the thing to boot up; and for Quynh to flip a chair away from the table and set it right next to him, before sitting down. It seems a little dramatic when she could have just pulled it over, but he doesn’t mind the flare. 

Quynh watches the numbers and letters flash across the screen with interest. “You have another device like this.” 

“My phone,” Booker answers. “It’s not as advanced as some of the ones these days. But it’s safer than the fancier ones.” 

“This is not safe?” Quynh asks. It’s completely safe if she thinks the computer might physically attack her - he wonders how to explain exactly what the internet is. The closest would be an encyclopedias, but encyclopedias had just come out when he was a little one, and even then he only knew what they were by virtue of his family’s profession. 

“It’s a tool,” he decides on, and he opens up an internet browser from his secure connection. “It lets you access… information.” 

“What kind of information?” Quynh asks impatiently, as if he could possibly think she’d be satisfied with such a simple answer. 

Booker shrugs again. “Almost anything you want. It’s not always right, or accurate. It’s... like a written history of the world. And you can use it to connect with people all over the world too.” 

There’s a look on Quynh’s face that matches her drawn lips, and he’s coming to associate that look with her thinking hard. “Like cars,” she offers, and it’s a surprisingly adequate comparison, given what he knows of what she knows about the world. 

“Sort of. Except instead of you, it’s your messages that are taking a ride. And they’re going a lot faster than we were, too.” 

“How fast?” 

“Nearly instant, for the most part.”

Quynh looks like she wants to say it’s impossible, but instead she says, “Show me.” 

Booker thinks of the least offensive place he can, and then types ‘Switzerland’ into the browser. The search populates, and Quynh inhales audibly as she narrows her eyes at the images and text that appear. “It’s Burgundy.” 

“It used to be, yeah.” Booker opens a history-based article of Switzerland, finds the link to Burgundy within it. “Everything’s recorded. Sometimes not well but. It’s there.” 

Quynh stares at it for a few seconds, and then asks quietly, “How far back does it go.” 

Oh. Booker remembers Andy asking that same question one day, a few decades ago. “Not that far back,” he says quietly, though he wishes it did. Or maybe the pain of the past was better left buried in the past. 

“I had a horse,” Quynh tells him, and then she gets up and leaves, and he doesn’t have the strength of heart to go after her just yet. 

She’d had Andy too, and Joe and Nicky - they were still around, somewhere, but she was too old to have kids, too old to have much connection to living things. Booker has a sudden yearning to find that horse, but he has no information to go off of, and he imagines horses in the 16th century were considered highly un-notable unless you were royalty. 

So he makes them dinner, instead. His cooking pales in comparison to Nicky’s but Quynh has been dying for the last 500 years, and cuisine has improved so much since his own first death that he doesn’t think she’ll notice. 

He brings the bowls out to the porch, where she sits on the steps, staring out at the setting sun. Booker sits down next to her, passes her a bowl and then the cutlery. A bottle of water, and he keeps his bottle of beer at his side, balancing his bowl on his lap. 

Quynh sniffs at the food, considering it dubiously. “What is this?” 

“Stir-fry,” he answers, and he spears a piece of pepper. Dwelling in the past doesn’t help most days, but it’s impossible to avoid entirely. If he can offer her something warm to eat as she watches the same sun setting that might be the only thing that hasn’t changed since she’d gone into the ocean, well. Sometimes that was the best anyone could hope for. “Peppers, chicken, zucchini, peas and corn. It’s all good for you.” 

She glances at him wearily, but perches her bowl on her bony knees. “Lazy man’s meal.” 

“The only kind I make,” he smiles, and there’s a flash of amusement across her face, a flicker so quick it’s gone a moment later. “Nicky cooks the most,” he tells her. They take turns, otherwise, but Nicky does the bulk of it when they’re together. 

Quynh seems cautious to talk about Nicky. “He was skittish to new tastes when we first met.” 

Booker nods; Andy had said the same, once upon a time. “Maybe that’s why he likes them so much now.” 

Quynh starts to eat, a judgemental glower meeting him when he takes a sip of beer. It’s fine, she can be judgemental all she wants. He’ll be through the six-pack by the time he goes to sleep, and with a nightcap of whiskey - he’s got to sleep through the night somehow, to keep them safe. 

The food makes Quynh sleepy, and when she finishes she yawns into the back of her hand, and again he’s reminded how cat-like the gesture is. “You can take the bed,” he offers, taking her bowl from her, and he’s almost at the door when she says, 

“But why?” 

Aside from the obvious - that she’s spent 500 years under the ocean and he might not be the pinnacle of gentleman, but he has a heart - he’s left with only a shrug for an answer. She’s still recovering, and he’s going to be drinking tonight anyway. “I’ll sleep on the couch,” he explains. 

Quynh stands, frowning at him. “Nonsense. Stay in the bed with me.” 

If this was one of those ridiculous new movies, that line would’ve been considered a proposition, though clearly it’s not. They’ve all shared beds in the past; lifetimes of knowing each other tended to lend itself well to that. He wouldn’t think Quynh was any different, but after everything she’d been through, he wants to take care not to make her uncomfortable or feel unsafe. 

But if she was asking… “Okay,” he relents; it doesn’t much matter to him, the couch or the floor and the bed. 

“Good,” she says decisively. Then she sits back down on the porch to watch the last bit of sun disappear from the horizon while he does the dishes. 

Quynh turns in for the night before he does, but she wakes up when he comes into the room. “Just me,” he mutters softly, and she lies back down, burying her face into the pillow with a soft, tired sound. He takes off his pants and keeps his undershirt on. It’s well into the wee hours of the morning, and his head is swimming pleasantly. There’ll be a few hours of sleep, and they’ll hit the road again in the morning. 

Quynh’s arm reaches out and lays across his stomach, and he looks over at her, but her eyes are closed and she’s still breathing evenly. He doesn’t mind the touch, and between the warmth of the bed and whatever the hell Quynh was to him now, he drifts off pretty quickly. 

-

Booker’s eyes burn from being open so long. He’d picked them both up a pair of sunglasses, aviator-style for himself and for Quynh, a wide, single-piece lens that covered half her face. “Shade for our eyes,” she’d summarized, slipping the pair on carefully. 

“Sunglasses,” he’d said, pulling away from the stand, and Quynh wiggled her fingers in front of his face - Booker could only assume that she was looking at her reflection in his sunglasses. 

“This is a good invention,” she’d told him, but they weren’t good enough to keep his eyes from burning. The glare of the sun had been negated, and Booker could no longer avoid the fact that his eyes were just dry, and had been open for entirely too long. 

Quynh snacks in the car like a mouse, opening the bags of chips and crackers, nibbled on an apple over the course of two hours, alternating bites with the buns Booker had bought with pieces of jerky meat. 

It makes him hungry, listening and watching her eat, and he’s got his own apple in hand when they come to a checkstop and Quynh suddenly sits up straight, the shift from lazy road-trip to alert palpable enough to make Booker glance around. “What?” 

Quynh takes off her sunglasses, but doesn’t answer him. It must be the checkpoint, and he reassures her, “It’s fine.” 

Quynh’s already pulled a gun out from under the seat, and the checkpoint is very definitely not going to be fine if she keeps it out in the open like that. “Put it away,” he says, “It’s going to cause trouble.” 

“They are causing trouble,” Quynh insists, lowering the gun only a fraction of an inch. “Those men are with the compound.” 

“We don’t know that,” Booker reasons, but Quynh isn’t listening to him, and he can feel the smile on his face becoming forced when they pull to a stop. “Hi,” he says warmly, but the guard who’s peering through the window has already spotted Quynh’s gun, and he shouts as Booker reaches out and grabs the collar of his shirt, yanking him hard enough so the collision between head and door knocks him out. 

Quynh has already pulled herself out of the open window on the other side of the car, and the two guards across the road who had turned their attention towards the car crumple to the ground when Quynh shoots both of them. 

“Quynh!” Booker hisses; she’s on top of the car and he can’t exactly take off while she’s standing up there. He opens his door, ducking almost immediately when he’s met with a rain of bullets. Quynh jumps on his back, pulling him away from the shots and down to the ground as the shower of bullets intensifies, others joining in from a different angle. 

“I said they were with the compound,” Quynh snaps at him, and he rightens himself. 

“It was worth a shot.” 

“No,” she says with annoyance, “It wasn’t. Get the guns from the car,” she orders, and she crawls towards the back of the car, shooting back at the bullets with the handgun. 

Booker thinks her ire is uncalled for, but he opens up the car door anway, staying as low as he can while he grabs the strap of the duffel and pulls it towards him. The rattle of the guns in there clattering to the ground brings Quynh back around to him, and she dumps her empty hand gun on the ground, ripping open the zipper. 

“They’re coming around now,” she tells him, and he hasn’t shown her how to work the submachine gun, but she figures it out quickly anyway. “They’re pinning us down to distract us from the movement along the fences. This was a trap.” 

While Booker maintains that it might not have been a trap if Quynh hadn’t barreled in guns blazing (in his experience, there are more incompetent guards around than competent ones), he does acknowledge that they’re stuck in the middle of it now. “So what do you want to do?” 

“Throw the explosive then run for the bushes there,” she answers, shoving a grenade into his hand and looking at the low line of bushes a few dozen metres away. She pulls out the short sword, holding it in her left hand, the gun in her other. “I will try to cut them down before they can get to you.” 

“I can help,” Booker starts, but Quynh shuts him down with a glare and a firm,

“You will go into the bushes. Now.” 

Booker holds in the protest this time, resigned to being relegated to sentry. Quynh has proven able in handling herself, and she clearly didn’t want him along for the ride. He’ll tackle the issue of why, later, when they weren’t surrounded by people trying to kill and capture them. Disengaging the safety, Booker tosses the grenade over the car and starts running for the bushes when he hears the panicked choruses of ‘grenade!’. 

Quynh is gone when he gets to the spot, but he has the duffel bag, and more importantly, the sniper rifle that’s in the duffel bag. 

Why be a sentry when he can sniper? He’s not nearly as good at it as Nicky is, but he’s managed to develop a decent shot over the course of his existence. He manages to follow behind Quynh with the scope of the sniper as she efficiently decimates the compound's forces. He’s able to take a few guard’s out while they aim at her, but Quynh is never in any danger. 

The deadly precision Quynh works with is in fact as legendary as Joe’s flattering commentary had been. She has a dancer's grace, twirling and moving with mesmerizing fluidity. The forces of the compound don’t stand a chance, scattered as they are around the perimeter. 

When Quynh is finished, she wipes her bloody sword against a fallen guard’s pant leg, and doesn’t glance at Booker when he comes up behind her. “Let’s go,” she says shortly, and Booker follows her, annoyed. 

He can acquiesce that it’s a conversation for later though, and it doesn’t take them too long to get into town. Quynh rinses the blood off her hands with water from a bottle, then Booker uses the rest of it to wipe the blood off her skin, and wring enough blood out of her hair so it won’t clump too obviously as it dries. 

Quynh pulls off her bloodstained sweater, wads it into a ball. Booker takes it and shoves it into the corner of a dumpster, pulls a leaking bag of trash over it. When he turns around, he can see Quynh shivering with the barest of trembles. He fishes his sweater out of the bag, holds it out to her. “Put this on.” 

“I have another.” 

“And you don’t want to get it dirty, before we can get cleaned up. Take mine.” 

Quynh gives him a peculiar look, and he realizes that the standards of cleanliness were much different when she’d last had to think about wearing clothes. 

Booker doesn’t care. Having something soft and clean to wear after an ordeal like this was something everyone deserved if it was available. Quynh maybe even more so than most. 

“Then you’ll have nothing to wear.” 

“I have another shirt,” Booker points out, “And I was in the bushes, so I’m much less dirty. And I don’t get as cold as you - take it.” 

Quynh finally takes it, and although it’s much too big for her, the shivering ceases. 

Booker throws her pants in the dumpster too while she puts on new ones - that can’t be helped, but they’ll pick up some other pants to wear, at some point.

They wander the streets for ten minutes until Booker finds a car he can break into and hotwire, and Quynh watches him with interest while he plays with the cables. The sparks flying cause her eyes to narrow a fraction of an inch, though that’s all the surprise she shows. 

“Do all cars do that?” she asks, and Booker shakes his head,

“Some are easier than others.” 

“Where did you learn?” 

Booker thinks about it, and he sparks the two wires together again. The memory of it brings a smile to his face, and he says, “New York,” fondly as the car grumbles to life. 

“Where is that?” Quynh asks, and Booker tosses the bag of guns into the backseat as he answers, 

“North America. People from Europe settled it in earnest around the 1600s.” 

“They had these cars then?” Quynh looks surprised and he doesn’t blame her. 

“No,” Booker answers, and the surprise slips off Quynh’s face. “Cars came around a few hundred years after that. Really only been the last hundred years that everyone’s started having one.” 

“They are convenient,” Quynh agrees, and then she frowns. “Unnatural.” 

To avoid a conversation about the industrial revolution, Booker hums in agreement. Things weren’t much better in his first few decades, but at least there were more untouched places on the planet back then. It was getting harder and harder to find those little pockets of wilderness, though some places were being reclaimed by it. 

There actually aren’t any seatbelts in this car that Quynh can avoid putting on, so he pulls to the mouth of the alleyway without further ado, pausing there to watch both sides of the street. 

“Go,” Quynh tells him impatiently after a few quiet seconds, but in this Booker is confident that he is better versed, 

“No. Someone could be watching for carjackers and we don’t need any more noise.” The universe isn’t kind to him for the most part, but this time it provides by sending a lightly militarized truck around the corner he’s looking at. “We’ll roll with the truck coming down the street there, it should give us a perimeter of protection.” 

As the truck passes, Booker pulls out, falling in behind it. Quynh keeps a sharp eye out the window as he tries to maintain an appropriate distance, and the quiet between them lingers until they reach the outside of the town. At that point he eases back a little more from the truck, putting some distance between them. They don’t need anyone else coming after them, and he feels pretty good that they haven’t been followed. 

Now that they’re relatively safe, Booker has a bone to pick. “I had your back in the compound,” Booker reminds her, “I’m more useful as a rear guard than a sniper.” 

Quynh draws herself straight and turns her head to study him, but there’s no give in her hard look. “We didn’t need you getting us into an even worse situation.” 

Booker can’t help but sigh. “Nine times out of ten, we go through that checkpoint and they’re none the wiser. It was your gun that escalated the situation. I asked you to hide it.” 

Quynh looks at him curiously, though the curiosity shifts to concern quickly. “You didn’t notice.”

“Notice what?” Booker asks, though it clearly isn’t a question. 

Quynh’s lips press together, and the similarity to Andy’s disapproval is so stark that he has to close his eyes for a moment. Not a great thing to do while you’re driving, so he opens them quickly after; Quynh continues after a notable pause. “They’d been with us for quite some time before we came to that checkstop. I wasn’t sure until I saw the uniforms, but we had three on our tail already.” 

Booker glances at the rearview mirror; it’s too late now, and there’s definitely no one following them on this hair comb country road but - he’d missed that. That they were being followed, before they arrived at the checkstop. 

How had he missed that? 

“I didn’t notice,” he admits, and Quynh is studying him now, like a scientist with a mouse. 

“Why not,” she demands softly. “You’re observant enough. I thought you were being intentionally negligent.” 

“Maybe I’m tired,” Booker throws out, and it’s meant to be flippant but it comes out self-analyzing. His eyes are still hurting, and come to think of it, he seems to be blinking slower than he was used to. 

“Why would you be tired? I’ve been with you this whole time.” 

“I’ve been driving.” 

“I’ve been here.” 

“You’ve been taking naps,” Booker clarifies, “I’m the one who’s been conscious.” 

“If you slept at night instead of drinking, you might not be so tired,” Quynh snaps, and Booker feels his jaw tighten, feels the tension growing in his arms, 

“I’d be even more exhausted, since I wouldn’t get any sleep.” 

That seems to soften Quynh’s anger, and she takes a pause before guessing: “Nightmares.” 

Booker glances at her, and that’s as much of that reluctant admission as he’ll give. 

Nightmares of her, of his past life. Nightmares of death and disappointment and crushing guilt that chokes him just as much as the salt water ever has. There is no escape from it, but at least with some booze, he can quiet it enough to rest just a little. 

Quynh puts a hand on his leg, pats it twice. “Tonight you will sleep,” she tells him, and she turns to look out the window. 

It takes her five minutes to fall asleep against it. 

-

Booker is utterly exhausted by the time they find somewhere to stop. That it’s an abandoned shack isn’t cause for celebration, but it has running water, and enough foliage next to the east-facing wall that they can hide the car. 

Quynh stays inside to rinse herself off while he takes care of covering the car with branches, and he tries his best not to feel too annoyed about the situation. He’s grumpy, tired, and he needs a drink, and the fact that he knows he wouldn’t normally be annoyed that someone was getting cleaned up while he was stuck draped over the car, getting poked with branches, doesn’t help either. 

By the time he’s finished, Quynh has started a fire, two cans of stew warming along its edge. She’s changed into her fresh clean sweater, and Booker feels a petty sentiment of ‘told you so’ as he punches his sweater into a pillow shape bundle. 

He’s despondent and in no mood to entertain, two things that Quynh is likely well aware of, since all she does is raise her eyes as he lies down on his back in the dirt with the pummeled sweater under his head, and closes his eyes. 

When he wakes up, there’s a blanket over him, and Quynh’s shoulders are covered with her own blanket, her back to him as she watches as dusk finishes settling on the endless fields around the shack. 

Booker groans when he gets up, feeling the ache of the hard ground, though the pain is already starting to settle. Quynh says without turning around, “You slept for three hours.” 

“I’m hungry,” Booker says flatly, and Quynh turns; the blanket dwarfs her features, the fire basking her face in a glow that makes her seem much more mild than he knows her to be. A thin arm reaches out from under the blanket, to pick up a bowl that had been hanging out by the fire. She extends it to him, and he takes it with a grunt, sitting up properly to spoon the warm mushy stew into his mouth. 

“What did they teach you?” Quynh asks curiously. 

He just woke up and his mouth is full of food, and he’s still annoyed with her for leaving him behind in a gaggle of bushes, so he doesn’t answer her. Quynh accepts his silence for the time being, feeding more wood into the fire and bringing him some water. 

When he’s finished though, she takes a seat on a log next to him; the intensity has come back to her eyes, and she asks again: “What did they teach you?” 

It’s not a question he can avoid for much longer. “What do you mean?” 

“Nico, Yusuf, An - what did they teach you?” 

“Teach me about… fighting?” he guesses, and she nods. Booker sighs; he just wants to go back to sleep, but he has a feeling she won’t leave him be without an answer. “They taught me everything they could.” 

“That’s a vague answer,” Quynh chides, and Booker stands up, 

“Your question was too broad.” 

“Where are you going?” Quynh asks, and Booker ignores her, because he’s not about to start reporting it every time he needs to take a piss. “You’re not a very good soldier,” Quynh tells him when he gets back, and he already knows this, doesn’t know why she’s fixating on it or even surprised by it at all. 

“I know.” 

“Nico and Yusuf picked things up quickly. They were quite formidable after they finally decided to get along. They were warriors, and they were disciplined.”

“I don’t care,” Booker tells her, and he bundles his sweater under him again, turns his back to her, and pulls the blanket tightly over his shoulders. “I need to sleep if I’m going to keep driving you around.” 

“Good night, Booker,” Quynh says, and he doesn’t like the amused tone of her voice, but he knows the exhaustion is making him make mistakes, is making him irritable, and he needs to get a handle on it. Quynh can take care of them while he’s sleeping, and he’ll take care of them while they’re in the car. 

He needs to stop worrying about her so much, she’s obviously doing fine. 

-

Booker wakes up in the morning to the smell of a small mammal roasting over the fire, and he realizes that Quynh must have gone hunting in the nearby trees at some point. The sun is just over the horizon now, so she must have done it in the dawn light, and while this used to be a staple for him once upon a time… 

“Don’t we have soup?” he asks, rolling over, and Quynh is munching on a strip of meat, 

“We should save the provisions.” 

“We can get food every fifty miles, we don’t need to save provisions.” 

“Eat your breakfast, Booker,” Quynh tells him, and he’s about to pass on that when he realizes that this might be a peace offering. He burns his fingers pulling off a leg, but they heal by the time it’s cool enough to eat. 

“I caught it to share with you,” Quynh confirms, and he reluctantly digs into the stringy meat, chewing too carefully and extracting too many small bones from his mouth. 

Eating the meal is as much thanks as he’s willing to offer for that particular olive branch, but when they get back into the car he finds his mood has rectified itself, and he doesn’t mind this time, when she puts her head against the window and sleeps. 

When they get to the highway, he does have to reach over to shake her awake. “Wake up,” he mutters, and her hand darts out to grab his arm, but she doesn’t squeeze it too hard this time, and he’ll take that as progress. “I need you to navigate,” he explains. 

“I thought you were good with maps,” she says dryly, and she yawns into the back of her hand before rubbing at her nose with it. 

“I am, but I’m driving.” No way were they using a GPS, and he was good at maps, not at memorizing neighbourhoods that have changed so drastically in the past 20 years. “In the glove box, there’s a map.” He found it there earlier that morning. “Can you find the dot next to the city name?” Quynh flips the map around, having initially opened it the wrong way, and Booker gives her the benefit of the doubt - she noticed it was upside-down, that counted for something. “The thickest line is the highway, we’re heading south, right now. We need to get to the dot.”

“This is a large city,” Quynh comments. 

It’s not, but it’s a hell of a lot bigger than most of the cities in Quynh’s time. “There’s bigger around.” 

Quynh looks over the map for so long that Booker’s afraid they’ve missed the exit, but finally she says, “The next turn,” and from there she’s surprisingly adept at guiding Booker through the streets. 

The amount of people around them makes Booker uneasy, but they should be anonymous enough in this crowd. They do look like foreigners, but more like expats than tourists. That should serve them well enough. 

When he pulls up to the location, he tucks the car into an alley. At least the alley is still here, and recollections about the specifics of the location start coming back slowly, triggered by the iron fire escape that replaced the rusting one, the hole in the bricks they’d long since patched up. The bottom ten feet of the brick are noticeably different than the rest of the building, though time has weathered it. 

Booker turns off the car, and in the quiet, Quynh folds the map, leaves it on the floor at her feet, and picks up a gun. 

“Come inside with me,” Booker tells her, and Quynh regards the seedy entrance to the joint next to them with suspicion, 

“Is this part of your plan?” 

“We left the plan behind when they ambushed us at the checkstop. Come inside with me.” 

“Who is it we’re meeting here?” Quynh asks, but she gets out of the car, pausing only to slip a dagger into her belt. 

The gun is conspicuous enough that he takes a glance down to the mouth of the alley, where a couple passes them with obvious stares. “Please put that away,” Booker says, and Quynh looks affronted, 

“Why?” 

“Because most people don’t walk around with a gun in their hand.” 

“We’re not most people,” Quynh counters, “And the gun will deter trouble.” 

That’s not quite how things work, though he does understand the medieval logic of ‘I have a sword and you don’t, so stay the fuck away from me’. “Actually, we’re trying to be most people right now. How about I take the gun, you keep the dagger.” He has more room to tuck it away, and more wherewithal to avoid using it and causing a scene. 

Quynh comes around the car and puts the gun in his hand, though she grips his wrist, hard. “I will get upset if this is another ambush,” she tells him shortly, and Booker sighs, 

“So will I, but it’s not like we have much choice.” 

“Can you not use the Internet?” she asks as he’s grabbing their bag from the back. 

Booker slings the strap over his shoulder and starts moving before she can change her mind, “The Internet might’ve been how they found us. I said sometimes it wasn’t safe.” He opens the door for her and she enters it like she’s clearing a building in a warzone- Booker takes her elbow gently, suffering her glare so that he can replace her at the front. 

The hallway they enter leads to a set of stairs, and he climbs down them in a hurry. Quynh’s quiet steps patter on the stairs behind him; round and round they go, until finally he’s met with a black door. 

Booker knocks on it with the back of his knuckles, exchanging what he hopes is a staying look with Quynh. 

Quynh puts her hand on the handle of the dagger on her belt, so he doesn’t think she understands what he’s going for. 

A small hatch opens in the door, and beady eyes peer out. “What?” 

“Tell Mari that an old friend is here. Booker.” 

“You know this person?” Quynh whispers at him, and Booker nods, 

“Owes me a favor.” 

The door opens a few seconds later, a squat man with a gun strapped across his chest ushering them in. Quynh withdraws her dagger, and the man takes a step back and raises his gun - Booker steps between them, his hands outstretched. 

If Quynh had wanted to make a move, the man would be dead, but she just hisses at Booker indignantly, pointing out: “He has a gun!” 

“She’s a little skittish,” Booker explains, and he puts a hand on the dagger, and a hand on the muzzle of the gun. “Please. We just want to talk to Mari.” 

“Put the gun down, they won’t hurt us.” Mari steps into the hallway and she eyes Quynh curiously, then amends, “He won’t hurt us. Come on in, Book.” The way she smiles fills Booker with regret, and Quynh definitely picks up on it as she steps past Booker to follow the woman into a room.

“Who are you?” Quynh is asking as he walks into the room, and Mari isn’t sitting in the chair behind the desk, she’s leaning against the desk. 

She’s older than Booker remembers her - of course she is, it’s been 23 years. There’s still an ache of affection for her in his heart, but it’s well tempered by reality. “I’m a friend,” Mari says, and she’s right, but Quynh counters evenly,

“We don’t have friends.”

“You are not Booker’s friend?” Mari asks curiously, though she’s obviously challenging the statement, and Quynh’s face breaks into a smile, and her dagger is lowered to her side, 

“I wouldn’t say so. More like family.” 

“Ah.” The realization is bittersweet and without joy. “I’m sorry.” 

It’s not what Quynh is expecting, but Booker steps in before a conversation starts. “We need a place to stay. Off the grid.” 

“Gonna get that stolen car out of my alley too?” Mari asks warily, but she pushes off the table and goes behind her desk, shuffling through some drawers. “Remember the place where my father shot you?” she asks, and Quynh’s eyes dart to Booker, who sighs, 

“Yes.” 

“It’s been abandoned for a while. The water is running, but there’s no fridge. There should still be gas for the stove; if not, you’ll have to build a fire.” 

“Thank you,” Booker tells her, and when he takes the keys from her hand he can’t help but wrap his other hand around hers, squeezing it tightly. “Thank you.” 

“Of course,” Mari says softly, and she extracts a hand so her fingers so they can brush against his considerable stubble. “For as long as I’m here.” 

Booker swallows, and he’s the first one to step away. Quynh follows after him, and he can feel her staring into his back as they climb the stairs, round and round. 

Once there in the car he downs half his flask and rubs at his eyes. 

“You were close with her,” Quynh mutters, and Booker presses his palms against his face, hard. 

“Something like that.” 

Quynh touches his leg, and the contact makes him lower his hands. “I’m sorry,” she tells him, and Booker nods once. 

They have to get going. He doesn’t want to put Mari in any more danger than was necessary. It takes a little while for the car to start up again, and he maneuvers it carefully out of the alley when it gets going. 

He doesn’t need a map to find this safehouse; Quynh puts her head against the window and falls asleep. 

The houses around the safehouse are far away, buffered by acres of tall swaying grass. Or it might be some kind of grain, Booker can’t tell, it’s too dark when they arrive and he shakes Quynh awake. 

She sleeps a lot, but that might not be unusual for someone recovering from the amount of death that she endured. It took a lot of energy to heal physical wounds, but he can’t imagine what kind of mental scarring she’s working through right now. 

But he does know that she’ll never be the same as she was before. He knows that without knowing what she was like before. Still, any version of Quynh out in the world is better than the version that he’s known. 

Booker parks the car at the back of the house, tries again to reach Andy, Joe, Nicky, Nile, on his phone. All the lines are disconnected now, and he resists the urge to chuck the phone out into the grass. 

They have each other, without him around to fuck anything up, so they have to be okay. 

And if not, once there was less heat on him and Quynh, they’ll just go get them. 

But first, he needs a drink. 

-

Booker’s trapped in a nightmare. 

Strapped down to a table, mouth filled with water, even though he’s not under any water. He can’t breath, choking and flailing, trying to get free of the restraints but he can’t escape them, can’t even pinpoint how they’re keeping him down; trying to clear his airway doesn’t help at all, and he can feel the death creeping closer, taking its time, the edges of panic overwhelming all his thoughts until there’s just pure terror-

Booker wakes up on the floor, gasping, a warm weight on top of him instead of unfeeling cold, and it takes a moment to realize that it’s Quynh laying there, and that her hands are on his face. 

“Booker,” she says quietly, and Booker’s shivering, trembling so hard that the image of her vibrates in his eyesight. 

“Shh,” she mutters, and she presses a kiss gently into his lips. 

It surprises him enough that he stops thinking about the drowning and the silent screams, but he still can’t control the trembling. 

When she pulls herself away, she says over him, her elbows on his chest, his face still in her hands. Lifts a hand and runs her fingers through his hair, pressing her fingertips firmly across his head. Over and over again, firm strokes that are impossible to ignore, deep enough to tug on the roots of his hair. It does succeed in pulling him out of his head, stroke by stroke. 

Booker’s not sure how long they stay like that, but once the trembling has ceased, once his hair is well pushed into the form of her touches; once his breath is even and she’s laid her head on his chest, and their breaths have fallen into an easy rhythm, she slips off. 

“To bed,” she tells him, and the last thing Booker wants to do is go back to sleep, but she pushes and pulls him towards the bed, her small hands digging into his back until he moves just to get away from them. 

Once she’s bullied him into lying down, she disappears out of the room. He takes advantage of her absence, sitting up. He doesn’t have the energy to fight her, but she’s not here right now. He’s about to get off the bed when she comes back with a glass of water, and he feels himself stiffening, 

“No-” 

“Shush,” she tells him sharply, and he’s so tired that he shuts his mouth and drinks the water she pushes into his hands even though it makes him want to throw up. “Lie down,” she tells him after he’s finished, plucking the glass out of his hands and pushing at his shoulder. 

Booker lies down, wonders if Quynh would bring him some whiskey, if he asked. 

Probably not. 

The way she eyed his flask and the bottles means she had no affection for it. 

But she does have some sort of affection for him, and she lays down on top of him again, her weight light but firm over his body. Tucks an arm under his, puts a hand on his face and strokes his cheek. 

“What are you doing?” he can’t help but ask, and she huffs at him, as if it’s obvious, 

“Making you feel better.” 

Oh. 

That actually does explain a lot. He puts an arm around her back, so hers isn’t digging into the back of his bicep, closes his eyes. Opens them again with a sharp inhale. 

Quynh’s thumb brushes against his lips. “You dreamt.” 

Booker nods; he might not be sharing her dreams anymore, but her nightmare still lingers in his mind, centuries worth of trauma. 

“I recognized the way you choke,” she says.

Of course she does, Booker thinks, it’s the way she’d been choking, for twice as long. 

Her fingers brush his cheekbone, gently. “Booker, do you know that when you started dreaming all those years ago, I started dreaming too?” 

It makes sense, but he didn’t think there was any room in her endless torment for her to dream about him. She’d recognized him, yes, but they haven’t spoken about this before. 

“And when you started dreaming about death,” she says softly, her finger running down the length of his nose now, “I started dreaming of life?” 

He goes still under her, the words sinking in. She shifts on top of him, and her face popping into his sightline. She’s not smiling, but there’s a gratitude there, among the exhaustion he sees hanging off her sometimes. “I had nothing for so long. And then, suddenly, I had glimpses. I felt the air again. You were sad, but you were alive - while I was trapped in death.” 

Of course, they were both seeing each other. He’d just never realized what that meant, on the other side of it. 

“I remembered living, because of you Booker. Think about what you gave me, instead of what you got in return.” 

She lays back down on his chest again, her ear over his heart, her hand over his neck. 

When he closes his eyes again, he doesn’t remember choking - he feels Quynh’s hand across his neck, remembers the feeling of reprieve each time he wakes up after a nightmare. How grateful he is for that first breath of air, how the panicked terror starts to fade away as soon as that air hits the top of his mouth. 

He does fall asleep, Quynh warm on top of him, thinking of life, instead of endless death. 

-

They drive through the next day, Quynh asking him about all things modern while he focuses on the road. He’s not well rested, but he’s more awake than he usually would be, after a night like the one he’d had. He knows it’s in large part due to Quynh, her presence, her words that may have finally been able to shift his perspective enough that the nightmares won’t take as deep a hold of him. 

They share a simple dinner of staples on a tiny, rickety table that night, and she regards him with level curiosity. “They’ve taught you well,” Quynh tells him, and she tears into the bread with both hands, plucking off pieces and placing them into her mouth. 

Booker sighs, takes a drink. 

Quynh seems to take his response as protest, and he’s not sure if it was or wasn’t. Either way, the challenge has been accepted, and she starts; “Nico taught you to cherish life. Respect the power we have to take it away. The responsibility we have to do it right. To cause no undue suffering.” 

Or he just watched his family die, had them hate him for it, and didn’t want anyone else to go through that. 

“You have a bleeding heart. I’m sure Yusuf showed you just how powerful that could be. It was stupid to throw me that knife in the prison. It wasn’t your love you were trusting in, or mine, it was theirs. And maybe I don’t love them anymore,” she says offhandedly, and he can’t believe that’s true. She hasn’t talked about them much, but he knows she aches for them the same way he does. “It turned out well for you, didn’t it? It might’ve not.”

He had been prepared for Quynh to kill him in the compound, that was true. Booker’s not sure anymore if she’s poking fun at him or not. 

“An taught you the drink.”

The last one surprises him, and he lowers the glass from his lips in confusion. 

He’s always been a drunk depressed bastard, that wasn’t Andy’s fault. 

“We were together for a long time,” Quynh tells him. There’s an air of wistfulness about it, but Booker can hear the edge in the words too. Quynh leans an elbow on the table, props her cheek on the back of her hand. “Sadness comes in waves, ones that roll onto the beach through some untold force and wash away the footprints in the sand from happier days. We all process that sadness differently. But this won’t help you,” Quynh tells him sternly, nodding at his bottle. “You will go to your drink, and when you finally come out, you will realize that you are still here, and nothing will marr or muddy that fact.” 

Now it feels entirely like an attack - and an attack on him and his family, and his anger has grown from a place he can’t pinpoint, or understand. “You don’t know what it’s like,” he starts, and he intends to go on but Quynh laughs, loudly, harshly, coldly, 

“No one knows what it’s like!” She shakes her head at him, looks at him like he’s a naive child. 

There’s weight in her gaze, centuries upon centuries suffering the crushing progress of time, endless years of experience. “We all live our own lives, no matter how entangled and entwined as they may be. You,” she says, and she grows so angry that Booker thinks she might actually murder him, “Have no idea. What it is like. And no one will ever. Because we are all alone in this world, Sebastien, and the only difference between drowning at the bottom of the ocean and drowning in the bottom of a bottle is that you choose to be alone, and I did not.” 

The words leave him cold; he had glimpses of Quynh, through all the nightmares over all those years. Suffocating, desperate deaths, without any end in sight - in a contest of suffering, Quynh will always win. But that doesn’t mean that he hasn’t suffered, doesn’t deserve whatever respite he chooses, to escape from the pain. 

He stands abruptly, and Quynh looks mildly intrigued. 

“You’re wrong,” he tells her, though his voice feels different, weaker somehow. “It wasn’t their love I was blindly trusting in when I threw you that knife. It was my own.” 

He leaves the cup and the bottle on the table, retires to the bedroom. 

Then he tries to call Andy again, but the signal is still dead. Joe and Nicky’s are the same, same with Nile. 

He almost throws his phone across the room in frustration, but he doesn’t want to give Quynh the insight of knowing she’d gotten to him, so he punches it into a pillow a couple of times. It’s a fleeting satisfaction anyway, because he’s quite certain she’s aware just how far she’d dug under his skin, and he’s happy to have downed most of the bottle when he lies back, because it means he falls asleep almost instantly. 

When he wakes up in the morning, Quynh is next to him, curled away from him but with her back pressed right up against his arm, her feet against his legs. She isn’t asleep, her body too tense for it, and he wonders why she wouldn’t move away when she felt him waking up. 

“What are you doing?” he asks, sleepiness cutting some of the sharpness in his voice. 

Quynh turns around, lifts herself up onto one arm to look down at him - ‘You’re a good person, Book,’ Andy had said, decades ago, a mirror image of Quynh right now, except smiling down at him, ‘We’ll get through it.’. 

Quynh doesn’t have a smile on her face, her mouth a tight line like she’s equally discomforted that she has to be here,

“I’m not going to sleep on the floor.” 

“There’s a couch.” 

“It’s warmer in here.” 

“I thought you disapproved of me.” 

Her displeasure breaks, so simply and easily that Booker wonders how many moments there are - that there can ever be - and at what point these moments started replaying themselves but with different people at different times. How unique, really, was the structure of any pain? The journey was individual, different for all, but the framework of it? 

Quynh speaks with the experience of a thousand lifetimes, gentle and soft and patient. “I don’t disapprove of you, Sebastian,” she tells him, and she reaches over and puts a hand on his cheek, moves his head to face her. “You are not your demons. There is more to you than that, and unlike some, you will have the time to see that.” 

Quynh leans down to press a kiss onto his forehead, then slips out of the bed so gracefully the mattress doesn’t even shift. 

Booker stares up at the ceiling until he hears Quynh smash something into the stovetop, and the subsequent sound of the stovetop cracking.

-

300 miles away, Nile bolts out of her sleep with the smell of whiskey and sweat and that rooty, cedar smell she can’t quite place; Quynh was alright, and Nile still hasn’t seen the person she’s with, but she knows that smell, knows the person who reminds her of it… 

“Motherfucker,” she mutters - could it be Booker?

-

Their next safehouse is stormed in the middle of the night, and Booker wakes up to his arm bleeding and the sound of gunshots and the slice of a sword against flesh. Quynh is gone from the bed, and he can’t tell where she is in the darkness. The light from outside only shows where she has been, body’s dropping to the floor in her wake. 

He manages to down two of the people attacking them, and he keeps the lights off when she comes back from clearing the hallway.

“Took you long enough,” she says irately, throwing a shirt at him. Where did she find it? When did she get it? Wasn’t she just in the hallway? They aren’t questions worth asking, and he pushes his head through the neckhole. “There are more coming. We must go.” 

“From the compound?” 

“Same style of clothing; the armour and weapons seem the same. I believe so,” she tells him, and she has their bag on her shoulders, and is already climbing out the window. “Booker,” she snaps at him, “Now.” 

“Yeah, boss,” Booker mutters under his breath, pulling on his shoes, feeling a little harassed and disgruntled. He isn’t being that slow, and they couldn’t all be amazon warrior goddesses that went from sleeping to murder mode in less than a second. 

Quynh’s already gone though, and he puts his head out the window to sight his landing before he follows after her. She tosses the bag at him, stalking off into the night with a gun in one hand and the short sword in the other. 

Booker hurries to keep up, adjusting the strap of the bag so he can pull out his own gun. “How many were there?” 

“Sixteen,” Quynh says, and he mimics her movements as she pressed up against walls and peeks around corners, keeping an eye behind them. “They would have caught you.” 

“They wouldn’t be looking for me if it wasn’t for you,” he counters; he doubts they would have brought as many to catch just him, though even with that logic, she probably still has a point. 

“You were sloppy,” she tells him sharply, and it feels so much like the training the others had forced him to labour through that he presses his lips together and stifles the urge to argue. Arguing didn’t get him anywhere when Andy or Nicky were critiquing him, and while he could usually sway Joe’s opinion on the more subjective parts of warfare, he didn’t think Quynh was the type to entertain any of it. 

“Okay,” he says amicably, but Quynh isn’t finished, 

“You were drunk.” 

“Yeah, I was,” he acknowledges through his teeth; that’s what he does, he gets drunk. He realizes that maybe with one of the reasons plaguing his dreams now plaguing his reality, he could maybe ease up on the blackout portions of the night - 

The flat of Quynh’s blade slaps against his chest, and he’s startled back into the wall behind him. “Pay attention,” she tells him sharply, “Clear your mind. Whatever other thoughts you have right now are useless.” She takes his shoulder roughly and quarter turns him, so he’s facing their six. “Make sure no one shoots us in the back.” 

“I am good at this,” Booker informs her tetchily, but he puts the distractions out of his mind for now, intent on showing her just that. 

It’s easy to slip into a rhythm with Quynh, who is so similar and yet so different from everyone else. Booker may have had a few centuries of practise, but the rust from the ocean has entirely washed off Quynh by now, leaving her poised and lethal and impossibly intentional. 

They make their way through the city without encountering anyone else; at the edge of the city is a field of horses, and Quynh walks up to them, a hand out towards the animals. 

Now look who’s distracted, Booker thinks, and he watches Quynh’s back as one of the horses comes to her, snorts, then lowers its head. 

Quynh had a horse. That’s one of the only things she’s told him about her life, other than how much of a fuck up he is on a regular basis.

“I’m not riding a horse,” he calls behind his shoulder, and Quynh comes up behind him, 

“We’ll teach you how to ride bareback.”

Booker looks at her to see if she’s serious, and she flashes him a wide smile. “No, thank you,” he says firmly, and Quynh teases, 

“You’ll enjoy it.” 

While he’s happy she’s not focusing on everything wrong with Booker playing soldier anymore, they do still need to get out of here. “They’ve got a car down the road.” 

He takes off and she follows him; the horse follows her, and so does the rest of the herd. “Very discrete,” he mutters to her as the fall of dozens of hooves track them until they’re too far away from the fence for them to follow. 

Quynh waits patiently while he finds the keys to the car in the barn, sitting on the hood of the car and squinting against the rising sun. 

When Booker finally shows up with the keys, Quynh smiles at him, getting into the passenger seat. “What,” he can’t help but antagonize, “No commentary on how slow I was?” 

“You’re life was in danger back there,” she tells him. “Discretion is more important now. But I’ll gladly enlighten you as to every failure and shortcoming you demonstrated before, if that’s what you’d like.” 

“I’ll pass,” he mutters, annoyed. 

Quynh must not appreciate his tone, because she launches into a breakdown regardless: “You didn’t hear the difference in the sounds of the cars outside. I’ve known cars for weeks and yet was able to distinguish between locals and army trucks. They made a racket coming into the building and going up the stairs, their boots are so heavy. You-”

“Stop,” he asks her softly, and she regards him, then turns away to look through the window. 

She doesn’t know him, or what he’s capable of. 

But is the resentment he feels because of her ignorance of him and his skills? Or because it reminds him too much of what he had he lost, when he threw that familiarity away in a bid for an end? 

-

Booker’s head is pounding when the sun comes up properly, and he must not be very good at hiding his distress because Quynh sits forward in her seat as he’s driving and says, “You’re unwell. Let me drive.” 

“You don’t know how to drive,” Booker tells her, but she doesn’t sit back in her seat, and he pulls over, unable to argue with her and drive when his brain feels like it’s going to splinter off into pieces. 

“Move,” Quynh tells him, but Booker stays his ground, 

“Quynh.” 

“How hard can it be?” Quynh asks, and Booker has to admit that thus far, she’s been a pretty quick study in everything that’s been thrown at her. 

“You don’t know the rules of the road.” 

“Neither does a vast majority of this population, if your swearing is any evidence. You need to rest.” 

Booker has no desire to be in a car accident, but he’s not sure if he’ll be able to discourage her. “We’ll take the side streets,” he tells her, and he gets out to go to the passenger side while she slides into his seat. 

They get off to a jerky start once he’s finished explaining the basics, and he feels like if they stay on the less populated roads, they should be fine. He takes a mouthful from his flask, feels Quynh’s disapproving gaze on him. “Eyes on the road,” he tells her dryly, and while the alcohol doesn’t help, it doesn’t hurt either. 

He was right, and she proves to be just as quick a study in this as in everything else. 

After twenty minutes he can’t bare to keep his eyes open any longer, and when Quynh demonstrates that she’s able to slow down and pause for a moment so that children have a chance to clear the street, Booker succumbs to the pressure in his head and the exhaustion in his bones, and sleeps into the afternoon. 

It’s that following night, when they’re curled up on the reclined seats of the car as best they can, that Quynh shakes him awake. This time her rough shaking comes from excitement, instead of danger.

“I dreamt of her,” Quynh tells him once he’s awake, and she stops her assault on him and uses the lever to get her seat back to the upright position. “The new one. They’re all in a place called Uberaba.” 

Booker blinks at her, and she reaches out to shake his arm again. “You want to go now?” he asks, bleary eyed and foggy from sleep. 

“You slept the whole day away Booker,” she reminds him, and while that was true, he’ll always insist that there are people in the world who simply can’t wake up to alertness in an instant all the time. “We must go before they move.” 

Booker groans, and yawns, and he rubs at his face and gets out of the car to stretch for a minute - but he does pull back onto the highway in the dead of the night, following it north and east to Uberaba. 

-

They find Nicky and Nile and Joe and Andy in the middle of a firefight - judging by their clothes, the burning car they’re using as cover previously had them inside of it. 

Thankfully, Booker and Quynh are on the same side of the burning car that the four of them are on, and there’s a blockade on the other side of the street with some armed military guards. These ones look slightly different than the ones that had been chasing them, though the symbol he can see on their badges are the same shape. 

“There they are,” Quynh tells him, and she climbs out of her seat to go into the rear and grab some guns - presumably to help them out - but Booker says, 

“Hold on,” and skids to a stop just a few feet away from the burning car. The spin-out of the back wheel causes the car to knock into Joe, and Quynh topples over to one side of the car. 

While he’s sure they’d be able to fend off whoever the hell was shooting at them (Booker assumes that it’s the same people from the compound, or at least distantly related), running away seems like both the easier option, and the safer option, which makes it the best option. 

“Get in!” he yells at them through the closed window, and Nicky hops into the front seat without pause while Joe and Andy open the back doors- 

Quynh scrambles away from Joe and finds herself on Andy’s lap, and Booker wishes he could see what she was thinking, but Nile’s slammed the door closed and it’s time to drive, so he guns the gas to get the hell out of there, grateful for the blockade that keeps the guards from following.

It takes Nicky a second to realize who’s in the backseat, and Quynh has her hands on Andy’s face, stroking her cheek, just as she’d done with the sketch she’d seen. “An,” she whispers, and Andy manages a breathless,

“Quynh,” before Quynh’s melting herself against Andy’s body, her head tucked up against Andy’s, her arms wrapped around Andy completely. 

Andy has a hand at the back of Quynh’s neck, cradling her close, her face pressed against Quynh’s shoulder. “God dammit,” Andy manages. 

Nile’s glaring at Booker through the rear view mirror, and she clearly has a bone to pick, oblivious of the centuries in the making reunion happening on the other end of the seat. “We spend two weeks chasing her around the country,” Nile says incredulously, “And you’ve had her this whole damn time? Fuck, Booker.” 

“Your cell phones weren’t working,” Booker snaps back, “I’ve been trying to get in touch. They’ve been on our tail this whole time.” 

“Our cellphones are working just fine,” Nile argues, “Copley wiped the old ones. Your number is the one out of service.” 

“Please,” Nicky interrupts, looking back at Nile and then at Booker. Andy’s too busy burying herself in Quynh to play mediator. “Not now.” 

Joe’s too busy grasping Quynh’s hand and staring at her and Andy, and Nicky watches them for a few minutes before turning back around. 

“Do you have a safehouse?” he asks Booker, and Booker nods,

“Another hour or so.” It should be decent enough, though it might be a little squishy for the six of them. 

Booker’s not opposed to the idea of sleeping in the car, in all honesty. 

“Yusuf,” Quynh says, and she’s finally pulled herself away from Andy after a sweet and involved kiss. She presses a kiss into Joe’s forehead, strokes his cheek. Booker can imagine the smile she has on her face, affectionate and bittersweet. 

She does the same to Nicky, from behind his seat, twisting his head so she can reach it for a forehead kiss, her arms wrapping around him and the seat, “Nico.”

She sits in Andy’s lap, Andy’s arm a buffer against the backseat door, her legs stretching out only so far as Joe’s furthest thigh. Andy keeps her tucked up close, and Booker would be surprised if she let her go any time soon. 

“I’m Nile,” Nile says politely, and Quynh considers her with the slightest narrowing of her eyes, 

“Quynh.” 

“I dreamt of you,” Nile says, and Quynh shakes her head, 

“I don’t remember you.” 

It makes sense - Booker and Quynh had two centuries to get acquainted with the nightmarish versions of themselves. Nile has only been around for a moment, by comparison. 

“Nile is a good person,” Nicky says, and he smiles warmly at Nile when he says it. 

Booker can feel Quynh’s eyes on his shoulder, glances at the rearview to confirm that she is looking at him. “What he said,” he offers. 

Quynh nods but she doesn’t offer up any further conversation, and Nile doesn’t either, exchanging a look with Booker through the mirror. He understands Nile’s reluctance, and has seen Quynh’s anger himself, in dreams and in life. They would all come to terms with it soon, and he tries to offer some reassurance to Nile through his smile.

For a moment there’s silence in the car, and then Quynh realizes breathlessly and says to Andy, “You lost it.” 

Andy glances at Booker with hurt, and he realizes what she’s assumed as Quynh says preemptively, “He didn’t say anything. I can see it.” Andy’s cheek is scrapped and there’s a burn on her shoulder, likely from the car. Considering the mangled disaster that their car had been, Booker’s surprised she’s not hurt worse. 

“We still have time,” Andy says, and Quynh doesn’t answer, laying her head on Andy’s shoulder, pushing the fingers of their hands together. 

There isn’t much more that’s said as Booker navigates to the safehouse. It’s better than some of the shacks that Quynh and he stayed at, and he doesn’t have the energy to feel embarrassed about it. It’s not like he was planning on having four extra adults staying with him and Quynh. 

At least there’s two rooms, with big enough beds for two, and a couch. The kitchen leaves much to be desired, but the two-burner stove was promised to be working, and there’s a bathroom with a shower that definitely won’t have enough hot water for everyone. 

“I got the floor,” he tells them after he comes inside, stepping aside so Quynh and Andy, holding hands, can come in. “You can take one room,” he tells them, “Joe and Nicky can take the other.” 

That Nile has the couch is obvious, and he sets the keys to the car on the counter. There’s an armchair that doesn’t look half bad too, and if he can drag the coffee table over, maybe he’ll be able to stretch out on that tonight. 

Joe follows with the duffle bag that Quynh and Booker have been living out of, and Nicky comes in behind him with the single bag of measly groceries. It’s not nearly enough for all of them, and Booker sighs when he realizes it, picking the keys back up. 

“I’ll go pick up some more stuff,” he says, and he’s halfway to the door when Quynh stops him, 

“Wait. I’ll come with you.” 

Booker turns around in time to see her slip her hand out of Andy’s grasp, and he clocks the pain that rips across Andy’s face at the action. 

“I’ll be fine,” he tells Quynh, and she glares at him, doesn’t stop walking,

“I am coming. Go.” 

He follows her out the door, and he doesn’t have the bravery to look behind him and see what kind of wreckage she’s left in her wake. 

They get into the car in silence. 

He doesn’t start it, his thoughts preoccupied by why she’s here with him, instead of in the safehouse with the people she belongs with. The people they’ve been trying to find this whole time. 

“Booker,” Quynh insists impatiently, and he glances at her, 

“Why are you here?” 

“Drive,” she tells him, but he has the keys in his hand and not the ignition, and none of it makes sense. 

“They’ve been waiting to see you for five hundred years.” 

Quynh turns fully in her seat, her legs coming up so that she’s kneeling on top of the seat, sitting back on her heels. “I’ve been dying for five hundred years.”

While they lived, Booker hears, even though Quynh doesn’t say it. While they were free to roam the earth, to meet others, to breathe, Quynh was dying, and Booker’s not sure exactly how that feels, but he does know that big of a feeling must be waging a pretty big war with the desire to see them. 

“Okay,” he says, and he starts the car and pulls away from the house; he can see Joe’s silhouette looking out the window through the rearview. 

Quynh settles back into her seat, her head leaning against the window. 

Just like old times. 

Except this time she doesn’t sleep, and she insists on going inside the market with Booker. But she sticks close to him for once, her hand flitting out to grab at his shirt or arm every once in a while. 

Quynh decides that the salad must have mangos and berries, and she picks up a loaf of bread from the deli section and starts nibbling on it right in the store. Booker grabs a bottle of vodka, a bottle of whiskey, a bottle of wine, and a pack of beer. Quynh is too distracted to even glance at him sourly. 

“What does the new one like?” Quynh asks when they’ve almost filled their two baskets, and Booker realizes that he doesn’t know. 

The time he spent with Nile was mostly filled with trying not to get killed or caught - she preferred semi-automatic rifles to hand guns, and he knew what size clothes would fit her. Her favorite food? Food had been a necessity, not a spread of options. 

“I’m not sure. American chocolate might be nice.” Unless chocolate from home made her sad, but he’s got too many things already to worry about, to worry about that. 

Quynh wouldn’t have any way of knowing what American chocolate was, but she somehow manages to select a Mars bar from the display and joins Booker at the checkout. 

On the way back to the safehouse, Booker doesn’t mention how weird it is to leave the love of your never-ending life to go on a grocery shop. Quynh occupies herself with nibbling on the bread they’d bought, getting crumbs all over the floor. 

When they get back, Quynh leaves Booker to take in the three bags himself; she drops the chocolate bar on Nile’s lap on her way to set herself up on Andy’s lap. Quynh sits sideways, her legs hanging off the armchair and her forehead tucked against Andy’s neck. 

Andy’s not about to look a gift horse in the mouth, wrapping her arms around Quynh without question. The relief and gratitude don’t manage to entirely hide her trepidation. 

Nile touches the chocolate bar in her lap with her finger, stroking it like someone might stroke a delicate bird feather, before offering Quynh a small smile and a, “Thanks.” 

It’s quiet as Nicky and Joe prepare a quick dinner, Booker taking a seat next to Nile, leaning his head back against the couch cushions and closing his eyes to give them a rest. 

He’s so tired. 

This whole time, he’s been trying to keep Quynh safe, trying to reunite her with Joe and Nicky and Andy. 

Finally they’re all here, all in one piece, and the conclusion of that quest has left him running on empty. 

But he’s hungry too, and by his own doing he’s claimed the floor. The floor won’t be available until they eat and retire - if not to the rooms, then to dim lights and murmured voices. 

Still, he can rest his eyes for a moment. 

“Booker,” Quynh mutters quietly, suddenly, right into his ear, and her hand is stroking his face and he’s not sure when he’d gotten used to her presence, but it doesn’t startle him. “We’re eating,” Quynh says when he opens his eyes, and they’ve already got the food all spread out on the coffee table. 

He’d fallen asleep and not woken up, and who knows how much he’s missed other than some kind of burden has been lifted off his shoulders, and he trusts these people, his family, all the way down to the deepest parts of his soul. 

“Yeah,” he mutters, and he rubs at his face, chases away the stinging in his eyes with the bone of his knuckles. 

They eat sitting around the coffee table - Andy and Quynh and Nile and Nicky on the floor, Joe on the armchair, and Booker on the couch, a little further away than everyone else, set apart and reaching forward only to refill his drink with whiskey, or to put more on his plate. 

Nicky gathers up the dishes at the end of the night, and Joe has been smoldering since Quynh walked out the door to go shopping. Probably since before them, when he and the others left Booker on the rocky beach. 

“Joe,” Booker says, gently, trying to preempt the conflict that he can feel coming. 

“Of course you’ve been behind this goose chase all this time,” Joe mutters resentful. He’s not even really angry; the emotions are boiling over and he can’t contain them any longer, the unhealed wounds Booker had left in his heart all those months ago still seeping and as raw as they ever had been. 

Booker understands the frustration, and can see how his involvement has, once again, caused things to come to an unfortunate conclusion while making things more complicated than they had to be. 

So he doesn’t say anything, takes all that emotion that is still coiled within Joe like a lash from a whip, smarting but deserved. 

What he isn’t expecting is for Quynh to stand up and snap at Joe, matching Joe’s breadth of emotion with a coldness Booker isn’t used to being on the protective end of. “You were not the one that infiltrated a military compound to come save me.” 

Joe’s face instantly falls into helplessness, and he stands as well, reaching for her hand; “We came as fast as we could, Quynh.” 

Quynh steps away from his touch, which causes Andy to stand. Andy puts herself between Quynh and the door, as a not that subtle obstacle. 

The significance of the movement isn’t lost on Quynh. 

“And yet you were too late,” she tells Joe - tells both of them. “Again.” 

That one word causes Joe’s face to crumble, and Booker can’t help but come to Joe’s defense, 

“That’s not fair,” he cautions Quynh. Then it’s Andy who comes to Quynh’s defense with a heartbreaking, guilty, 

“We left her down there, Book.” 

“No,” Booker insists, and before Nicky can get his own two cents in, Booker turns to Quynh. “No. You’re the one who told me that we all suffer. And they suffered too, over it; endlessly. You don’t get to throw their sorrow and pain in their face when you wouldn’t let me wallow in mine.” 

Instead of going on the offensive, Quynh seems thoughtful, even if she does seem annoyed at him for breaking up what promised to be a cathartic tirade. After a moment she says, “There are things you can’t forget or forgive, Booker.” 

Joe’s heart is still cracked wide open on his face, and he looks at Booker pleadingly. Booker nods, understanding that soundless plea; Joe will forgive him, was always going to forgive him. They all were, one day. 

“There’s time enough to forgive anything,” he tells Quynh, because he knows why he can’t go back to normal with them right now, but she’s already suffered so much and for so long, he doesn’t understand why she doesn’t want to. Why she isn’t trying harder to get back to them. 

“Not for everyone,” Quynh says, and the stony mask starts to slip off Andy’s face, and Booker can’t let this be how it ends, and it really is starting to seem like an ending right now, instead of the beginning he’d been chasing after. 

He understands the irony of it, how he still can’t manage to forgive himself, but this is what Andy had been waiting for - what they’ve all, save Nile, been waiting for. He owes it to them to give it a try. 

“Come on,” Booker tells Quynh, and he takes her hand and pulls her out of the room, genuinely surprised by the fact that she lets him do it and goes willingly with him.

He takes her outside, down the road to an empty field recently shorn, where it’s quiet. He walks her into the field, far away enough from all the houses and the street so that they won’t be heard, won’t be seen after he tugs her down to the ground, and lays back. 

As he gazes up at the stars, he hears Quynh sigh, and then she’s lying down next to him. 

“I understand what you’re trying to tell me,” Quynh starts, but Booker shakes his head,

“It’s not a contest of suffering, Quynh.” 

“I’m so angry with them.” 

“I know,” Booker nods, and he’s still holding Quynh’s hand so he squeezes it, brings it up to rest against his chest. 

Oh, how he knows that anger so intimately. 

“I’ve missed them,” Quynh tells him quietly. 

“Yeah,” Booker nods, and he turns his head to look at her, an answerless slant across his mouth. 

“I cannot pretend it didn’t happen. As much as I want to.” 

Booker shakes his head in agreement - he knows you can’t disappear these things from your mind, no matter how much you wanted, desired, hoped for it. 

Quynh struggles with her words, and Booker wishes her the best of luck; he hasn’t been able to figure it out yet either, how to reconcile such a powerful desire with such a powerful hatred. It didn’t matter that Quynh’s is directed at Andy and Nicky and Joe, and his is directed at himself. 

But Booker knows where she lands now, deep in that gut-wrenching urge to not be alone. 

“Stay with me,” Booker offers, and Quynh looks at him with confusion. “They don’t want me around right now. With good reason,” he admits. “You don’t want them around either, right now. We’ll still see them. We’ll just… all have some space.” 

“Where will we go?” Quynh asks, and Booker feels himself shrug, then he turns his head to look back at the stars above them.

“Wherever you want to go, Quynh.”


End file.
